Thing 27: LibraryThing

I've heard Tim Spalding speak at conferences various times now and his product LibraryThing always sounded interesting. and he's easy to listen to, informal, knowledgable, forward-thinking..everything i look for in a conference speaker. at any rate, i must say that I never rushed home to create my own LT account, however....

Now that I've played with it for this exercise, I can see the appeal. It is SO EASY to add a title from your collection. I love that you can then add your own customizations, like tags, and select from a multitude of book covers. and then of course you can follow tag clouds to find other items of similar interest. what a great overall idea!

this is definitely for booklovers. one doesn't need to know the first thing about cataloging, which is the real genius behind it.

My mind wanders not to how can I use this for my personal collection, but rather how can we use this as a library system? I looked over LTFL (for libs) and am curious. More so, I looked at their list of libraries using LT and am amazed at how FEW are running the same ILS we are. that didn't bode well, i must say. anyway, i'll continue my investigation.